I have lots of ideas of posts for the month, but I"m not sure if I can come up with 31 separate postings.  We’ll give it a try.  I’m hoping to not get tagged by a lot of people with the "list your favorite 8 this or that" again this year, although since I was a little bit desperate for posts by the end of the month, I did participate in a few of those.  

For now, since I do try to keep this blog centered around my photography, I will post my #1 picture from my Flickr account, and I do believe it’s been posted here before.  We weren’t sure if our wedding photographer got any shots of my lovely wife’s bouquet, so I took this on Sunday morning, while her parents were visiting.

So, we’ll see what this month brings to jeremyreitman.com.  Last year my stats soared, and since i’ve been posting more and more this year (as I’ve taken lots more photos) i’ve had a fair number of visitors every day.  

And, here’s another one, but this time one of my favorites, taken with my Yashica Mat 124G TLR Camera, which I bought from ebay.

Here’s a side by side shot of both, the Yashica on the left, and the 30D image (square cropped) on the right.  Considerably different look, I think.  Both images shot at ISO 400, f4, 1/125s.

Here’s another, just the film this time.  Daphne seemed to want in on the action, so we had to oblige.

 And now one of just Daphne, this time taken with Fuji Provia transparency (slide) film.  It has an AMAZING look to the film, but is a bit more expensive to process.  Having transparency film is much nicer because you don’t have to scan the images to see what you end up with, you just have to hold them up to a light source.

And a couple from my sister’s softball game in Mansfield, TX last weekend.  Again, with the Fuji Provia 100.

I think I may try experimenting with processing some black and white film at home.  It costs about $15/roll to have it processed at most of the local labs, but you can get a kit (including all the chemicals) to process it at home for around $40, and that’s enough chemicals to last a good long while.  Unfortunately to process the transparency color film, the chemicals come in larger volumes than most consumers would use in a reasonable amount of time, but the black and white home processing (at least from what i’ve read) is totally reasonable…and there’s no darkroom required as long as you’re not printing/enlarging. 

To complicate the matter further, the interwebs are full of rumors of Canon replacing the 5D very soon, as it is about (or past) the age at which Canon usually announces replacements. The 5D is a fine camera at any age, and it’s certainly not going to stop taking good photos, but I kind of hate to buy a camera just to have it upgraded only a couple months later. Plus, as soon as the new 5D Mark II (or whatever they call it) hits the market, there will be a flood of people dumping their perfectly good 5D’s to pick up the new one. Either way you couldn’t possibly go wrong. Both are or will be excellent cameras.

I have recently found the work of some very talented photographers, like Kate Hutchinson (blog) and Thomas Broening (blog), who both post to their blogs with images from their old film cameras (Thomas shoots with this camera). I am not quite sure what Kate uses. I loved the look of their images and decided to search for an affordable option for a medium format film body (the digital bodies can run upwards of $20,000). I saw some images produced with an old Rolleiflex 2.8 TLR film camera, but a more recent version of the Rollei can run several thousand dollars. This is where the Yashica comes in. I read up a bit on the old Yashica TLR’s and many people said that the later models with the Yashinon lenses would give the Rollei’s a run for their money. It costs about $5 to process a 12 exposure roll of 120 film (with no prints).

Here is the first image I scanned from my Yashica. This is my beautiful wife Liz. She’s hard at work on a Friday, they day she is able to telecommute.

I helped photograph a wedding this weekend, and I ran through a roll of film with the Yashica. I am scanning those tonight and will hopefully have a few great ones to post tomorrow. After the first couple images, I am more than happy with this camera…WOW!!! It really makes me slow down, compose the image, meter the lighting, check the camera settings, meter again, and then take the picture. Perhaps just what I need rather than just the “snap and delete” mentality I have had since purchasing the 30D.